This
article is part of a ‘Green vs Labour’ series on Bright Green. Here, Jen
Izaakson and Ross Speer reply to JamesMcAsh‘s argument that socialists should work
within the Labour Party.

Labour’s 1945 manifesto

The efforts of the Labour left over
the past five years have been huge, but of little avail.

The project of transforming Labour
lies in tatters. Despite concerted pressure, the Miliband leadership has duly
fallen in to line with the establishment consensus: austerity, privatisation
and attacks on immigration. Assaults on its union links, compounded by a
secular decline in membership and the crushing of Party democracy, has left
Labour sustained only by myth, nostalgia, and an apparent lack of alternatives.
The day has long passed when it could be considered a plausible strategy to try
and claim the Labour Party for the left.

The
reality is that the Labour Party has never been the party of
the left that our contemporaries sometimes want to believe it to have been. From
the Fabians, to Anthony Crosland and the Revisionists of the 1950s and 60s, to
the Blairites of today, Labour has always struggled with its identity and
purpose: a party of class or a party of nation? Repeatedly, the question has
been resolved in favour of the latter. Each time the Labour Party fails to do
what socialists suppose it should, and what, at least in the past, it claimed
it would do, a left response emerges and seems to make some headway.

Disillusionment
with the Wilson governments was met with the rise of Bennism. Anger at Blairism
has been partially dissipated by the ‘reclamation’ attempts of Owen Jones, Len
McCluskey and others. But with each iteration the challenge from the left
becomes weaker, more muted, and less ambitious. Occasional signs of hope, even
the odd victory, serve to continue the charade. The trend, however, is in the
in the wrong direction. Dogmatic subservience to the Labour Party is dressed up
as a clever tactical manoeuvre, yet it owes more to an inability to let go of
the past than it does to calculated reason. Their electoral strategy is to
obtain the votes of the extra-Labour Party left by moralising and browbeating.
With judgement day looming this is the only approach open to them, given that
they have no significant record of success to point to inside the Party. But
preaching will not cut it this time. We have come to a point
at which socialists must take a stand and say they’ve had enough: we
will no longer be guilt-tripped into supporting a disgraceful right-wing party
just because it entertains some increasingly tenuous links with the trade
unions.

The
phenomenon of ‘Labourism’ – that dogged obsession with the Labour Party that
has beset generations of socialists – is not new. Ever since the ascendancy of the Fabians, the Labour Party has
been dominated and led not by the working class, but by a timid reforming
intelligentsia. From that point on the Labour left was, as Tom
Nairn observed in 1964, “destined to become a left wing
permanently, necessarily in rebellion against Fabian mediocrity—but unable to
formulate and develop coherently this revolt, intellectually empty, paralysed
inside the larger body of Labourism, a permanent minority opposition lacking
the resources to assume hegemony of the movement in its turn.” From the outset the Labour left was subordinated to its
authoritarian right, and its position has never much moved from there since. At
momentary conjunctures it has broken through – 1945, 1960, 1983. Each glimpse
proved fleeting.

The transformation of the Labour
Party into the B-team of British capitalism, from popular movement to electoral
machine, was slow but sure. In accepting the strictures laid out for it by
Britain’s business class the Labour Party long ago nullified itself as any sort
of threat to corporate interests, and in doing so abolished any possibility of
being a vehicle for the left. Its vision of democracy became fundamentally
colored by the image of people (‘voters’) loyally trooping out on Election Day,
and being quiescent on every other. When they refused, the Labour Party knew
which side it was on: and it was not theirs.

What McAsh
says he wants is a party of the labour movement. What McAsh has – and will only
ever have in the Labour Party – is an instrument well-honed in its task of
channeling any dynamism shown by this movement in to the stifling and dangerous
conformism of the ballot box. The Labour Party has never
lived up the dream, and consequently the term ‘reclamation’ is
valuable only for its myth-making qualities, not its accuracy. We are relegated merely to trying to claim it. How many times must
we fall before we face the fact that it is unreformable? Reliving
past failures is not a demonstration of tactical nous. At some point something
has to give, lest we spend the next fifty years caught in the trap that the
Labour left has been complicit in creating. Socialists might be solid believers
in second chances, but even we cannot be so generous as to provide another
fifty years of good graces.

When
Labour chose to detach itself from its working class base it also detached
itself from any sense ofpurpose. The Labour Party no longer enjoys deep
links with the class that birthed it, and consequently it does not possess the
structures that might once have offered the possibility of altering its course. The Labour Party we confront is constructed around an
institutional hostility to the left. Nearly always the dominant
narrative throughout its history, its worst excesses could, in the past, at
least be restrained. The Party’s long civil war resulted in a decisive victory
for the right. Perhaps nowhere is this triumph of nation over class presently
clearer than in its visceral dismissals of the SNP. In a sorry advance on
its spitefulantics in Tower Hamlets, the Labour Party has
chosen to effectively dissolve itself north of the border. The
refusal to commit to ‘lock David Cameron out of Downing Street’ is now
culminating in the increasingly pathetic figure of Douglas Alexander, the
Shadow Foreign Secretary and veteran parliamentarian who faces being unseated
by 20-year old SNP upstart Mhairi Black. Ed Miliband would sooner
unleash the Tories on the people of Scotland then he would cede to the demand
of unilateral disarmament, thereby endangering the capacity of the
British state to engage in mass murder.

The stock response of an impotent
Labour left – when they have anything to say about this at all – is incredulous
admonishment that ordinary people would have the cheek to vote for a party
other than Labour as and when it becomes available for them to do so. If their
complaint that the SNP is also not a socialist party is surely true then it
merely serves as a damning indictment of the present state of the Labour Party,
that they can be outflanked on the gaping chasm to their left with such breezy
effortlessness. Moderate spending increases are hardly the stuff of a socialist
wishlist, but the Labour Party has become so immersed in its warped right-wing
caricature of reality that even this is barely thinkable from within its ranks.
The Labour left has not even managed to propel rail nationalisation – a solidly
popular policy by any account – on to the agenda, McAsh’s claim that
“baby-steps” have been made on the issue notwithstanding.

What
we both want is a socialist party. The Labour left cannot even deliver a social
democratic one.When Rachel Reeves is not in full
flow, it is almost possible to believe that the Miliband Labour Party has
reached the giddy heights of social liberalism. This in spite of apparently
favourable conditions for the left, a position of strength, both in terms of
raw votes and of Labour’s financial dependence, as well as the election of the
trade union backed candidate to the leadership.

Left parties across the UK are taking
up the real mantle of progress

It is easy
enough, at election time, to tell the principled socialist, for they still
exist inside the Labour Party in droves, from the slavish loyalist. The former
will be hoping and wishing for Labour to look left to form a coalition after
May 7th, however
difficult Miliband has now made that task. The latter will spend the next few
weeks degenerating in to a series of shrill attacks on the Greens and the
nationalist parties, the organisations that have caused them considerable
embarrassment by having risen so rapidly from obscurity to put forward the type
of program that the Labour left has been unable to present since 1983. The Greens and their allies in Plaid Cymru and the SNP, whatever
reservations one might justifiably maintain about these parties, are proof
enough that it is now considerably easier to construct a left-wing project from
outside the Labour Party than it is within it.

The slavish loyalists may now be lost
to us, and will likely choose, whatever the weather, to keep themselves locked
in the prison alongside the Blairites. With those that have not let their
socialist principles become overridden by appeals to ‘tactics’, we hope that
after this election they will plot their exit from the sinking ship and join us
in constructing a coalition of the radical left from the remnants of three
decades of defeats.

*Jennifer Izaakson is a member of the
Green Party and an SNP/Plaid Cymru supporter. Ross Speer is not.

Please contact P.Murry at yrrumuk@googlemail.com if you are interested.

GREEN LEFT FRINGE AT AUTUMN CONFERENCE 2012

Both Green Left and the Green Party Trade Union Group applied to have fringes at the Green Party Conference September 7-10 2012, Conferences Committee turned down both these requests. Green Left decided to mount a fringe outside conference at 6-8pm on Saturday 8th September GPTU agreed to support this meeting and contribute towards costs of room hire. Video clips at http://greenleftblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/green-left-fringe-fringe-at-green-party.html